Crossfire Status in 2018

[Dionisiatis]

With the introduction of DX12 i expected crossfire/SLI to become much more commonplace, especially since early benchmarks showed nice synergy between all DX12-supporting cards. However with each year passing, CF/SLI is less heard of (at least to me)
The question is: Should i buy an RX 580 8GB counting on buying a second in 2-3 years? Is such choice future-proof? Is CF support expected to continue?
The other option for me is to go for the 570 4gb which costs considerably less and will last me about 2-3 years, and then go for a new one.
Thanks.

 

[Barty1884]

CFx/SLI (strictly speaking) wasn't even *needed* in DX12 given the inclusion of Explicit Multi-Adapter (you could use Nvidia+AMD etc, no need to be the same card etc etc).

The problem is, that still had to be developed for too - and only Ashes of the Singularity (last I heard) supported it.


I wouldn't suggest planning on CFx or SLI in future. The likelihood of it making a resurgence is extremely low.

I remember seeing stats, that something like <2% of gamings rigs utilized CFx or SLI (not sure on the source there), so it's a very unattractive proposition for developers.

Some engines make it easier to incorporate, so it still "exists", but it's not really actively supported.


I wouldn't go out of your way to buy an SLI compatible board..... although most ATX boards will support CFx, so it's at least an option in future *IF* it makes sense.


My opinion on cards is to buy what you need/expect to need in the near future (ideally the best card you can afford for now), and upgrade over time.

 

[Dionisiatis]

So the reason Devs dont bother making their games able to run on multiple gpus is the fact that the percent of gamers with that ability is too low. With the end of Moore's law, arent multiple gpu solutions gonna be the only way?

 

[Barty1884]

That's my speculation as to the "why".

The fact is, it's not supported well and, even in titles that support it, 2x cards rarely every = 2x performance.
Scaling tends to be in the +25-50%, for 2x the money. Unless it's the *only* option (ie 2x 1080TIs or Titan's currently), the money is better invested in a single, stronger GPU.

Citing Moore's law.... arguably, yes. Multi-GPU's may be the only way forward......eventually, and not likely to be anytime soon.
Even assuming we're looking at the 'near' future (10 years from now, maybe). A mid-range card from 2017/18 is going to be long obsolete before/if multi-GPUs become the 'solution'.

 

[10tacle]

To my knowledge, Far Cry 5 is the only recently released game that reasonably scales well with a second GPU (Crossfire or SLI). But yeah it is a dying platform unfortunately. However, high end GPUs are also making it obsolete. Case in point, a GTX 1080 Ti > GTX 1070s in SLI. Case in point with Ashes:

1080 Ti -> http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=35496

1070 SLI -> http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=22921

FC5 Crossfire and SLI scaling benchmarks -> https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JedQKk8TT5BL8QxiJ6uyEA-650-80.png

 

[Simon Horne]

If you have a vega 64 maybe crossfire is worth a look but it’s an expensive option to get better fps in 4K , but vega 64 in Xfire with freesync monitors does give playable 4K performance. I perfer amd drivers now , I feel amd have done lot good work on this area xfire works faultlessly now with there drivers . Same cannot be said of nvidia s drivers , still now we get a bad driver quite frequently. In sli of crossfire this matters . Crossfire will be dropped by amd I’m sure nvidia say they will support for the forseable future on high end cards , but they done nothing about improving there driver sli interface . It’s nothing to do with gaming engines not supporting either platform games don’t need any extra code in there development it’s covered by the standard programming. No it’s hardware s drivers software development, amd updated the pci ex 3.0 bus to enable two cards to communicate. Why didn’t nvidia do this . Because they want you to buy there v high end cards . Amd sort have shot themselves in the foot a bit but but vega is not as powerful in single card as nvidia 1080 , but this still makes a case for x fire with Radeon cards . Next gen cards will be s way of , nvidias new ones are nothing but rebranding slightly increased performance but a higher price will be charged by nvidia im sure . Long term ten years multi cards will be more important far more important,and the work amd has done on there drivers and enabling pci ex to interface gpu s will prove forward thinking on amds part . I really hope amd don’t abandon crossfire altogether, I’m sure they won’t just put it on hold and resurrect it in the future when more gpu power will be needed , and if will

 

[Eximo]

I recall looking up explicit multi-adapter and the other asymmetric variant and found about two dozen titles that supported it. Nothing major though.

Last I read Unreal Engine uses a compression system in its base engine that wouldn't allow for SLI or Crossfire. Not sure about Unity. Since those are the two really big game engines at the moment, I suspect you won't see much development to offer support.

Always keep in mind that these engines are used on mobile device and consoles which only have single GPUs.

I haven't checked the steam hardware survey in a while, but multi-GPU was pretty darn rare.